The Quark Publishing System (QPS) was a collaborative

workflow management system A workflow management system (WfMS or WFMS) provides an infrastructure for the set-up, performance and monitoring of a defined sequence of tasks, arranged as a workflow application. International standards There are several international standards ...

first released in 1991 by

Quark, Inc. Quark Software Inc. (founded 1981 in Denver, Colorado, USA) is a privately owned software company which specializes in enterprise publishing software for automating the production of customer communications. The company's original goal was to "c ...

and now superseded by Quark Publishing Platform. It allowed the creators of large publications to manage the process by which the publications are created, and also track the flow of created materials through the various phases of creation, editing, review, combination, and printing. It was mostly used by the producers of periodical publications like magazines, newspapers and catalog but also occasionally used for producing complicated one-off publications like books and advertising materials.

System

QPS Classic was a cross-platform workgroup publishing solution that streamlines workflow and provides tools to manage workloads. It incorporated a central repository for content with modules for file management,

file locking File locking is a mechanism that restricts access to a computer file, or to a region of a file, by allowing only one user or process to modify or delete it at a specific time and to prevent reading of the file while it's being modified or deleted ...

, monitoring, tracking, version control, revision management, page design, and copyediting. One large innovation/advantage of the system was that QPS allowed layout artists and editors to work at the same document at the same time. The system was configurable by end users/administrators and IT professionals with a fairly modest amount of training. It was very flexible and became more stable since having been launched, in 2004, as a Mac OS X product. Previous versions of QPS were notorious for various bugs and crashes that required strict adherence to certain procedures and maintenance. QPS was first released in 1991 by

after having been beta-tested at BusinessWeek and M&T Publishing on DBMS Magazine in the late 1980s. The product was long considered the market leader with over 900 sites worldwide and over 50,000 seats sold. For the first decade of its existence, QPS was more-or-less without competitors. Although some companies did offer similarly conceived workflow systems, most of those were designed/developed with the newspaper market in mind. QPS latterly supported Mac, Web and Windows Clients, editors could use

QuarkXPress QuarkXPress is a desktop publishing software for creating and editing complex page layouts in a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) environment. It runs on macOS and Windows. It was first released by Quark, Inc. in 1987 and is still owned and ...

and

InDesign Adobe InDesign is a desktop publishing and page layout designing software application produced by Adobe Inc. and first released in 1999. It can be used to create works such as posters, flyers, brochures, magazines, newspapers, presentations, bo ...

for page layouting, QuarkCopyDesk, InCopy and an Internet Browser for editing, copyfitting and reviewing text and Adobe Photoshop,

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...

Word etc. for content editing. In 2009,

in association with Stepnet Ingénierie, a French software editor, developed a java based framework which gave web services to almost all QPS features and some of QuarkXPress' ones, such as editing rich text, cropping high resolution pictures or generate PDF/X from standard QuarkXPress files within a QPS secured workflow. This framework supported the latest release of QPS and was available as an option, called QPS Web Portal. Core modules included in QPS Classic * QuarkDispatch * QuarkDispatch Administrator * QuarkDispatch Manager * QuarkDispatch XTensions module * QuarkCopyDesk * QuarkConnect * Quark License Administrator (QLA) * QuarkXPress Core modules included/supported in QPS 8 * QPS Server * QPS Connect Client * QPS XTensions module for QuarkXPres * QPS XTensions module for QuarkCopyDesk * QPS WebHub * QuarkCopyDesk * QuarkXPress * QuarkXPress Server * Quark License Administrator (QLA) * QPS Web Portal * Adobe InDesign * Adobe InCopy

History

* QPS 1.0 (1991): Support for

3.1, Clients and Server only Mac-based * QPS 1.1 (1996): Support for

3.3 * QPS 2.0 (1998): Support for

4, Clients also Windows-based * QPS 2.2 (2003): Support for

5, first version to use

TCP/IP The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suit ...

as a communication method * QPS 3.0 (2004): Support for

6 * QPS 3.5 (2005): Support for

6.5 * QPS 3.6 (2007): Server

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mos ...

-based, so also available for Windows. * QPS 7 (2007): Support for

7, Server switched to a service-based architecture. Additional web editor to edit copy within a web browser. * QPS 7.4 (2008): Support for

Mac OS X Leopard Mac OS X Leopard (version 10.5) is the sixth software versioning, major release of macOS, Apple Inc., Apple's desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers. Leopard was released on October 26, 2007 as the successor of Mac OS X Tig ...

, Web Editor transforms to Web Hub with more functionalities using the Web browser * QPS 8 (2008): Support for Adobe InDesign & Adobe InCopy, support for

8 and Quark CopyDesk 8 * QPS 8.1.6 (2009): Added Automation Services as a standard module of QPS * QPS 8.5 (2010): Major overhaul of QPS to include features like collections, asset type based workflows, SharePoint adapter, App Studio * QPS 9 (2011): Support for

9, Web Support for bullets and numbering, conditional styles * QPS 9 (2011): Support for

9, Web Support for bullets and numbering, conditional styles * Quark announces Quark Publishing Platform as a replacement for QPS (2012){{cite web, url=http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/News/News-Item/Quark-Unveils-Publishing-Platform-for-Customer-Communications-85260.htm, title=Quark Unveils Publishing Platform for Customer Communications, work=eContent

References

Desktop publishing software